For the Road: A Collection

White Walls

Sam remembered when he was small enough for his mother to pick up. She used to squeeze him as tight as she could, and he would giggle and protest and squirm until she put him down, though she knew he loved her hugs. Seeing those frail arms now, poking out of the hospital blanket’s shelter like strands of uncooked spaghetti, it was hard to imagine this was ever possible.

She was sleeping, curled in on herself like a question mark, and that fuzzy blanket was only pulled up to her bony ribs in some nurse’s half-hearted attempt at pretending to care for her patient. Sam’s mother, though she didn’t use to, tended to get cold, so Sam carefully drew the blanket up under her chin, but she didn’t stir.

Sam drew up a metal chair to her bedside but found it difficult to look at her pale, almost waxy features, and he glanced around the room. It was mostly bare, with blindingly white walls and fluorescent lighting that washed out its inhabitants until they were ghost-like. The only hint of color came from the flowers he brought daily; there were rows of small pots crowding the windowsill, twenty-three in all. Though most of the petals were drying up, today’s addition of peonies added the bloom of pink now absent from his mother’s cheeks.

Sighing, Sam redirected his gaze towards the window. He couldn’t remember the last sunny day they’d had. Today’s batch of grey clouds were bunched together like furrowed eyebrows in frowns of disapproval.

Sam kept looking around, trying to see anything but his mother’s fragile body, though there wasn't much to see. His eyes darted faster and faster around the room, picking out every stray detail— the cold metal, the beeping machine, the lint on the blanket, the dying flowers in their matching pots—

The walls began to close in on him, enveloping him in a hold much more suffocating than that of his mother’s arms.